


The Tallinn

by phyripo



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Gen, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Timeline Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-20
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-06-22 10:21:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15579816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phyripo/pseuds/phyripo
Summary: "My name is Eduard Mets, and I run an inn for time travelers."The story of how people from several different time periods keep meeting in an inn in 21st-century Estonia. Eduard may not be able to leave his inn, but he looks out for everyone who passes through, especially the regulars, many of whom know they're regulars before he does. Difficult as it to build relationships across timelines, he knows it's worth trying.





	The Tallinn

**Author's Note:**

> The time travel theory in this, as well as the concepts of time traveler inns and such, is mostly borrowed from the cute webcomic [Saint for Rent](http://www.saintforrent.com/) with some small tweaks here and there! (But honestly, it's so well-thought out that I didn't want to change it much.)
> 
> This exists solely because I thought of the pun 'the Tall-inn' and it was _so dumb_ and so very Estonia that I had to use it somehow... Also I love how 'Timeline Shenanigans' is a tag. 
> 
> FEATURING  
> Eduard Mets - Estonia  
> Egill Steinsson - Iceland  
> Erzsébet Héderváry - Hungary  
> Tuomi Väinämöinen - Finland  
> Tolys Laurinaitis - Lithuania  
> and more! Other characters will be listed at the end of the chapter where they appear

At the very beginning, it gets more confusing instead of starting to make sense.

The year is 2019. Eduard is twenty-five years old and trying to make sense of his newfound life as innkeeper in the Estonian capital’s Old City.

He grew up here, yet he didn’t. The sea is further away than he’s used to, the buildings less weathered, and the Estonian tricolor flown with pride in many locations along the narrow cobblestone streets.

Eduard has always felt Estonian, but he thinks it’s weak compared to the way today’s residents of Tallinn feel it. It makes him almost wistful.

Still, he’s getting his inn in order when his first guest arrived with a tinkle of the bell over the door at the end of the hallway on the top floor. Soon, footsteps clunk with certainty down the stairs, and Eduard straightens when he sees a pair of boots descend the stairs first, followed by the rest of a man who’s moderately tall by Eduard’s standards, maybe a few years older than he is himself. The assortment of clothes he’s wearing makes it impossible to tell where he’s from, but his eyes are an unnatural violet color that points towards _far away_.

“Hello,” Eduard says, nervously pushing his glasses up. “Welcome to the Tallinn.”

“Hi, Eduard,” the man says easily. “I keep telling you to change that dumb name.”

Eduard, who was about to launch into a carefully memorized explanation about the inn and himself, gapes at his guest, who’s ambling to the kitchen but stops and turns when he gets no reply.

His hair is absurdly pale, tied up in a long ponytail at the nape of his neck with a single braid running through it.

“You alright?” he asks. His Estonian is charmingly accented. “I’d be expecting you to…”

“ _Expecting_ me—”

Violet eyes widen. “Wait, shit—what year is it? How long have you been innkeeper?”

“It’s… It’s 2019,” Eduard replies, trying to steady his voice. He knew this could happen. “It’s my first week as—you’re the first guest.”

The man stares.

“We’ve never met before,” he eventually says, faintly. “ _Freya_ , we’ve never met before. Never thought I’d see the day I’d have to introduce myself. Well, I mean…”

They both take deep breaths.

“I’m Egill Steinsson,” the man says. His white, knee-high boots click on the old wooden floor in a way that’s just shy of irritating when he walks over and hold his left hand out to Eduard. From underneath the sleeve of his jacket, the glowing lines of his traveler’s visa peek out.

Eduard reaches over the reception desk.

“Eduard Mets,” he introduces himself. “But…”

“I know, yeah.” Egill chews on his lower lip as he looks around the room. “I should have guessed. It’s different here.”

“I’m working on it.”

“I know.” He smiles a bit. “You’ll get there.”

Although he is dying to ask a million questions, because Egill apparently knows the Tallinn—which he knows is a terrible name, but he couldn’t resist it—better than he does, Eduard knows he shouldn’t and keeps quiet. For all that his preparation to be an innkeeper was messy, he has been convinced of the necessity of not asking questions about the future.

Never mind, he thinks wryly, that he’s from the 25th century himself. He only knows what his history classes have taught him, and he was terrible at remembering the important things.

“Where did you come from?” he asks Egill instead.

Egill is leaning on the reception desk with both hands now, looking a little unsure of himself. Do they become friends? It must be odd to meet with a friend who hasn’t ever met you before. It’s very likely Eduard will find out in due time.

“I’m Icelandic,” Egill replies. “Although, you know how it is in the 25th century.”

So he _was_ correct in assuming his time of birth. The designer babies of the century are infamous.

“ _But_ I’ve just come from the Grand Florence in 1868, now.”

“Well, welcome to 2019,” Eduard tells him, and a small smile plays around his mouth.

“Thank you.”

* * *

Eduard’s second guest arrives about a week later, just when he’s finished putting rugs in the lobby and about three days after Egill Steinsson has left. He’d kept to himself, apparently not knowing how to behave when Eduard doesn’t yet know him. Eduard didn’t see him leave.

The woman almost falls down the stairs with heavily curled hair and holes in her corduroys. He only knows of the existence of corduroys because that’s exactly the kind of dumb history fact he retains.

She looks wildly around her when she stumbles down the last steps and into the lobby, checking over her shoulder and narrowing her eyes at Eduard when she spots him.

“Welcome to the Tallinn,” he says. The woman swallows; grips her jacket so tightly her knuckles whiten.

“Tallinn?” she repeats, and then something Eduard doesn’t understand. He blinks.

Right.

“Do you speak Estonian?” he tries in the contemporary version of the language he had to learn, and receives a blank look. “English?”

She doesn’t appear to know the current lingua franca either.

“Russian?” Eduard struggles with that one still, but the woman’s face clears a bit, the deepest worry lines between her deep-set eyes smoothing out. Her heavy eye shadow is smudged.

“Am I in Tallinn?” she asks in Russian.

“You are,” he confirms, glad to have overcome at least one problem and reminding himself to try and pick up some more languages. Maybe Icelandic. “Do you want to check in—ma’am!”

Because she has abruptly stalked to the doors and thrown them open to the sunny street outside, startling some passersby. Eduard rushes after her and pulls the doors shut again. For a second, she glares at him, but then her expression crumbles into unadulterated panic.

“What’s the date?” she demands, making a grab for Eduard’s shirt. “Did I fucking time-travel?”

“I—ma’am—it’s June 2019—please let me go. I’ll explain, I promise.”

She reluctantly unwraps her fingers from his collar and follows close on his heels as he walks back to the safety of the reception desk and tries to explain.

“My name is Eduard Mets, and the Tallinn is an inn for time travelers.”

In Eduard’s time, the time where he was born and raised, time travel was—is? will be?—finally being regulated after almost a century of floundering through it. Eduard, from a version of Tallinn only kept from being swallowed by either the Baltic Sea or Lake Ülemiste by some of the finest coastal engineering in the world, had been all too eager to sign up for the test program, even when he was told it could be dangerous. At the time, he hadn’t had much to hold on to, anyway.

The Tallinn is a stable point in time, created by his presence as innkeeper. He’d be lying if he claimed to understand the theory of the timestream that opens up right on his top floor, even if he did have to go through it to get here, to be allowed the inn, but he knows his practicalities, which is good enough for now.

Eduard can’t leave the grounds of his inn.

The ‘grounds’, considering his prime location in the Old Town, up Toompea Hill, consist of the inn itself, a stoop, and a tiny terrace out back, looking out over the city. It’s more than enough. Back home, he couldn’t see the horizon—it was like something from a fairytale. Here, from the windows on the top floor where he’s put his own bedroom, the sea is visible all the way to where it meets the sky, calm on most days, dark blue and, unexpectedly, feeling like a safety net.

As he talks, the woman is silent, but her fingers keep clenching in her jacket, the fur lining of which is entirely inappropriate for the season, not to mention the era.

“I was in Budapest,” she says when he’s done. “ _Budapest_. In _1974_.”

“You’re _from_ 1974?” Eduard asks, intrigued. People living before the discovery of time travel are not supposed to do it. Then again, he reckons it could be argued that there _is_ no ‘before’ time travel.

“I was born in 1948, but I’ve always…”

“Time has always been linear?”

She groans, finally pulls her hands off her jacket, and leans forward, putting her elbows on the reception desk and burying her fingers in her brown hair.

“I met this _thing_ ,” she mumbles.

“In the…” Eduard flounders, trying to remember the Russian word for ‘timestream’. “Where you went between Budapest and here?”

She nods.

“Those are… Honestly, no one is sure, but they monitor the travelers. Did you receive a visa?”

Her eyes are tired when she looks up at him and inches the sleeve of her jacket up the tiniest bit so that the very edge of the familiar glowing outline becomes visible. It’s not a subtle way of marking time travelers, but Eduard has the feeling the beings in the timestream don’t care much about subtlety, what with their terrifying amorphous bodies and eyes that always seem to be watching you.

“Congratulations,” he says, because what can he do. “You’re a time traveler.”

“I didn’t ask to be!” she groans into the dark wood of the desk. “Can I go back home?”

Eduard bites his thumbnail.

“Of course.” He hesitates, flicking his eyes over the photographs of the city he’s been putting on the walls. “But you can’t go to specific coordinates from here.”

“Meaning?” She raises herself to her full height, which is much smaller than practically everyone Eduard knew back home.

“You should get to the Grand Florence Hotel, it’s the closest one from here where they can help you travel to specific points.” 1974 Budapest would have to be the River Inn, a boat traveling up and down the river Danube for most of the twentieth century. Eduard has made very sure to memorize all the nearby stable points.

“But you can’t get me there directly,” the woman says.

He shrugs apologetically. The Tallinn is nowhere near important enough for that. Maybe one day.

“So, what, I have to travel around endlessly and just fucking hope I get to Florence or back to the right time in Budapest?”

“I’m sorry, the system isn’t perfect. I assume it never will be, or we would have known.”

The vague attempt at a joke doesn’t cheer her up in the slightest, but he supposes that’s only fair.

“You could stay here for a few days if you’d like. Get your bearings. Explore 2019, even.”

She’s silent for a long moment, her breathing now calmed but still heavy in the silent lobby. He should get some music up in here. Contemporary radio sounds like a good way to welcome guests to the era. Lost in thought, he almost misses the woman’s next question.

“This time, this Estonia…” She frowns. “It’s _Estonian_.”

“Yes, of course,” Eduard says, then realizes that where—when—she comes from, Estonia is Soviet territory, and maybe he shouldn’t have said that, but she’s already breaking the rules just by having traveled here in first place, so he figures it can’t actually hurt. “And Hungary is, well… Hungarian.”

She nods, her eyes calculating.

“I’d like to check in, I think,” she says slowly. “My name is Erzsébet Héderváry.”

Eduard hums and turns to his painfully primitive computer—it has honest-to-god _keys_ —to enter her as a guest, not bothering to ask what changed her mind, because he has the feeling he wouldn’t really understand the answer at all. After doing that, hands her the key to the room with the best view apart from his own bedroom.

“Welcome to 2019,” he says. “Enjoy your stay.”

A smile, lighting up her eyes. “Thank you. I think I’ll like it here.”

As he watches her go, Eduard gets the faint feeling he hasn’t seen the last of Erzsébet yet.

* * *

Egill returns about two weeks later, looking much younger than before, and tries to strike up a familiar conversation with Erzsébet, who’s still here. He slinks off awkwardly when she doesn’t recognize him. So Eduard will _definitely_ be seeing more of her, he reckons.

This Egill seems shier than the older version, less sure of himself in the way he moves and in how he speaks to Eduard. He can’t be older than 20.

It’s _strange_ , but Eduard will have to get used to that.

It helps, in a way, when his half-brother, Tuomi, shows up, looking exactly as Eduard remembers him, all smiles and mischievous brown eyes.

“You finally got approved?” Eduard asks, surprised. There is usually a certain amount of money involved in becoming an approved time traveler. Money that their family simply doesn’t have. He groans when Tuomi grins innocently.

“Approved is a big word.”

“You’re gonna get along great with Erzsébet,” Eduard tells him, just as the woman in question enters the lobby of the Tallinn, wearing clothes appropriate for the era but seemingly having been unwilling to let go of her heavy makeup so far. She has been out a lot over the past two weeks, apparently mostly visiting museums and—something that scares Eduard—learning about the internet and how to use it, in addition to doing some shopping.

“What?” she asks, and Eduard just gestures Tuomi towards her vaguely. He goes with another grin and they spend the next few hours huddled over a table of the dining room, talking too low to be overheard.

Eduard is instantly terrified. He loves Tuomi, but he is definitely the reason they got in trouble so often when they were children, and Erzsébet seems to be developing some sort of plan he’s choosing to remain blissfully ignorant of until it lands trouble on his doorstep.

Egill helps Eduard make breakfast in the morning, knowing where to find all the necessities better than Eduard himself does and telling him that Erzsébet likes bagels.

“How do you know?” he asks against his better judgment.

A shrug. “She’s always eating bagels when I’ve seen her.”

But Eduard would never add bagels to his breakfast without prompting, which means that Egill telling him the Hungarian woman likes bagels is both the cause and the direct result of apparently seeing her eating them all the time. It’s a loop that hurts his head to think about.

It hasn’t gotten any less confusing yet, but Eduard is sure he’ll get there eventually. Time will tell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ya no Lithuania yet but he'll appear!! Soon. I guess this is more of an introduction than anything else, which is why there's,, not much of the actual plot apparent yeT


End file.
